1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sheet handling apparatus and, more particularly, to a sheet handling apparatus for handling free standing inserts. A free standing insert can be a single sheet of paper, two tab pages, or it can be many sheets bound together or encased in a plastic or paper bag.
2. Brief Description of Related Developments
In the newspaper industry, post-press inserting and collating equipment are used for assembling products such as advertising and promotional materials to customers. Book and magazine manufactures also use inserting and collating for assembling books, magazines, and marriage mail products. Other manufactures use inserting and collating equipment for assembling products such as advertising and promotional materials to postal customers. Now inserts volumes are increasing and advertisers want to target their inserts to specific customers. Consequently, equipment capacity and physical mailroom space are often insufficient, and labor costs are rising for equipment maintenance. Currently, such industries use hoppers to move free standing inserts and signatures (collectively referred to in this disclosure as “FSI”) to their proper package. FSI are stacked above a hopper, from which the FSI are pulled from the bottom of a stack by a vacuum and gripper device and fed onto on a raceway at capacity raceway speed. The FSI proceed to raceway speed within microseconds. During the travel of the FSI, they are measured for thickness and presence. A problem arises if an error is detected as there is no way to correct the problem. Existing technology dates back to hoppers that were introduced in the 1940's. As raceway speed has been increased in response to industry demands, hopper-related equipment has increased dramatically in weight and vibration. Existing equipment to move single-sheet FSI may weight 500 pounds. The weight and thus inertia of such apparatus prevents quick stops and starts for allowing corrections when misfeeds occur. Furthermore, existing equipment continues the feeding operation and conveyance of FSI to their destination, despite having detected faults such as blanks and multiple sheets, resulting in defective products. An alarm is provided indicating defective operation, but not a solution. Thus, bundles with mistaken inserts must be separated and corrected at considerable time and expense, or worse, delivered with defects to customers. There is currently a demand to package inserted and collated materials together but the packages are too large to run in conventional hoppers. A great deal of expense is incurred by newspapers to assemble the large packages by hand. This process is commonly referred to as Big-into-Big.